While Van Gogh devoted his first weeks in Auvers to painting the
village's streets and houses, during the month of June he turned to
a very different setting: the nearby wheat fields. His views of the
open fields suggest the influence of Daubigny and of 17th century
Dutch landscape painting. In contrast to these models, however, his
new paintings of the landscape around Auvers use a very high horizon.
This functions to focus our attention on the pictorial handling, which
suggests the texture and movement of the ears of wheat. In the fields
painted by Van Gogh in Auvers we no longer see the figures of sowers
or harvesters found in his earlier rural compositions. The fields are
now empty of human presence, houses or any other narrative element.
While the picturesque prevailed in the artist's views of the village,
now he expresses the sublime, which is associated with the idea of
the infinite. In a letter of this time Van Gogh wrote: "I myself am
quite absorbed in the inmense plain with wheatfields against the
hills, boundless as a sea". The sublime is an aesthetic value close to
the tragic: "They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and
I did not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and extreme
loneliness".